


sleep (is hard to come by these days, darling)

by Anniely



Category: The Blacklist (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Romance, hugs and kisses, minor injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25319536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anniely/pseuds/Anniely
Summary: Some nights they can’t sleep.
Relationships: Elizabeth Keen/Raymond Reddington
Comments: 8
Kudos: 88





	1. Chapter 1

Some nights Liz can’t sleep. Her pillow is suddenly hard as a brick, her mattress feels lumpy, the seams of her PJs dig into her hip. Even though her body is heavy with exhaustion after a hard day of running after criminals, her head won’t stop spinning, throwing thoughts around her mind like laundry in a washing machine.  
  
On nights like that, Liz gets up, turns on the TV and channel-surfs until she has found the most mind-numbing program possible, then cuddles up with a pillow in her arms and lets the flickering lights and monotonous voices slowly but surely lull her to sleep.  
  
Tonight, though, there’s a heavy arm around her waist, a big hand gentle on her ribcage and warm breath on her shoulder. As much as Liz doesn’t want to lie here, caught up in her own thoughts and her inability to fall asleep, she wants to wake Red even less, which is bound to happen if she gets out of bed.  
  
She is also loathe to move out of his arms.  
  
The moment Red had permission to touch, Liz realized that he had been holding back. The light touch at the small of her back or her elbow became hands on her waist and kisses to the forehead, quick hugs and not-so-quick make-out sessions in dark corners. He would brush her hair behind her ear and off her shoulder, help her into her coat and take her hand in the back of cars.  
Liz hadn’t truly, until then, understood what a genuinely tactile person Red was. When she had seen him kiss and hug business partners or associates, she had always assumed it was part of the Concierge of Crime persona and sometimes that is true. Red likes to touch people whose company he enjoys and he will tolerate touching people if he needs or wants something from them. Sometimes, after meeting with an especially sleazy criminal, Red will take of his suit jacket, roll up his sleeves and tug Liz against him, his cheek resting on the top of her head, arms tight around her shoulders, like he needs to erase the feeling of someone unwelcome on his skin. In that way, she is his sin eater.  
  
Red sighs against her neck, his fingers clenching in the fabric of her t-shirt before going slack again. Liz tries to change her position on her pillow without moving too much, but the pillow remains stubbornly uncomfortable and she begins to sweat, even though the night isn’t particularly warm. She looks over at her nightstand and the digital clock there, which proclaims the time as 2:57 in bright red numbers. She can almost already feel the exhaustion dragging down her feet, making her head sluggish and foggy, a state that even Red’s Jamaican coffee won’t be able to cure.  
  
At 3:14, Liz gives up. If she stays in bed any longer, she is going to start screaming, so she slips out from under Red’s arm and makes her way out of the bedroom as quietly as possible. She doesn’t dare stop to check whether Red is still asleep, but since she can’t hear any movement from the bed, she hopes she managed not to wake him. The bedroom door she leaves slightly ajar.  
  
The neighborhood she moved to is farther outside the city than her previous house and apartment and there is little light shining in through the window curtains, but Liz manages to make it downstairs without bumping into anything. She gets herself a glass of water from the kitchen, collects Red’s coat from the hallway and then unlocks the French door leading onto the back patio. The rocking chair there has a pillow and a blanket waiting on it and Liz curls up on the chair, coat around her arms and blanket over her legs, slowly sipping her water.  
  
While the lack of city lights mean that she didn’t have to buy blackout curtains, there is sadly still too much light pollution for the stars to be as clear in the night sky as they were back during her childhood in Nebraska. A few houses further down, a dog starts barking. Liz closes her eyes, almost empty glass still cradled in her hands, and listens to the nocturnal sounds of her neighborhood.  
She likes it here, is glad that Red persuaded her to buy the house, even though she was so very against buying another one, sure that she would rattle around in it all by herself. She still doesn’t know whether he was already planning on making it his sometimes-home, too. In the end, Liz certainly bought it with Red in mind.  
  
The creak of the living room floorboards announces Red’s arrival before his voice does and Liz is already smiling when he starts talking.  
  
"Did you steal my coat, Lizzy?"  
  
"Maybe," she gives back without turning around and buries her nose in the collar of said coat, breathing in the smell of leather and cologne and Red.  
  
"Maybe," he repeats and walks to stand next to the rocking chair. "If you didn’t take it, I’m afraid there is a coat thief loose in our home."  
  
It warms Liz more than any coat or blanket could, the casual way Red now often refers to the house as _home_.  
  
"Good thing you’re living with a federal agent. I’ll keep you safe." She turns her head up to look at his face, which she has come to know so well, some parts completely in shadow, some illuminated by the dim night light, much like the man himself. Liz would know his face anywhere, would know it if she were blind and if she lost her memories; she would know _him_ anywhere.  
  
"Of course you will."  
  
Liz nods her head once.  
  
"Trouble sleeping?" Red asks, looking at her with a concerned crease right between his brows.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Any particular reason?"  
  
"No. Just … trouble sleeping. I’m sorry for waking you."  
  
Red doesn’t say anything, only puts his warm hand on her shoulder, moving it up the side of her neck, fingers grazing her ear. He puts his other arm around her shoulders and comes to stand behind the rocking chair, cradling her head against his chest.  
  
For the first time that night, with her left leg cramping and her fingers freezing, Liz feels that she will eventually be able to fall asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Some nights Red can’t sleep. He doesn’t know whether it proves that he is, truly, a monster, but it’s not the things he has done that keep him awake, the faces of the people he has killed or had killed or got killed. These days, he rarely even sees Katarina’s face.  
Instead he ruminates, going over every step he has taken since he came into Elizabeth’s life, every decision he has made and all the ones he hasn’t. He can’t help but feel that every scrape and bruise, every tear and heartbreak, every single ounce of pain Liz has felt since he has demanded to talk to her has been his fault.  
  
Liz, his beautiful and courageous Lizzie, who still allows him to touch her, who let him in so much more than he ever even hoped for, who _loves him_ , is always quick to shut him up whenever he voices these kinds of thoughts in her presence. She will take his face in her hands, look at him and tell him, "I love you. Had I known what it would take to get here, I would still choose this in a heartbeat, Red. I would choose _you_ in a heartbeat. I will always choose you." It made him cry, the first time she told him, big, fat, ugly tears, that culminated in him sobbing into her shoulder like a little boy. And he would choose her, too, every time, but it doesn’t stop him from wondering about what ifs and maybes.  
  
Tonight, the what ifs and maybes are dancing the tango again, making the wonderfully soft sheets feel sticky against his skin and even Lizzie’s warm weights in his arms isn’t enough to help him fall asleep. Red presses a light kiss against her neck, that one spot where she always, after a day at work or a shower, smells the most like her and then carefully takes his arm from around Lizzie’s waist and gets out of bed.  
  
He crosses the room completely silently.  
  
Liz needs her sleep. The Blacklister he handed the FBI yesterday, a financier named Ferdinand Barteux, turned out to be a nastier piece of work than Red had anticipated. His intel proved to be incomplete and the trap they set for Barteux didn’t spring as it should have. One explosion and a long gash on Lizzie’s shoulder later, Red finally caught up with the financier. He did hand him over to the FBI, eventually, after a lengthy talk and some minor force. Liz, her arm already bandaged with a pristine white piece of gauze, shook her head at him, an equally fond and exasperated smile on her lips, when Red and Dembe frogmarched Barteux into the Post Office.  
  
"Aggressive negotiations, Red?" Lizzie asked, as he came to stand next to her desk, where she was already pecking away at her report.  
  
"There was no negotiating," Red says, then inclined his head slightly in her direction. "There might have been some aggression, although I really couldn’t say, Agent Keen."  
  
The memory of Lizzie’s laugh follows Red down the stairs and into the study. It’s a small room just off the living room and when Liz first moved into the house and showed him around, Red thought she would make it into an office for herself.  
  
"God, no!" Liz laughed, when he said as much. "Most of the files we have can't leave the Post Office anyway. Besides, I take enough work home with me as it is." She tapped her temple with her finger.  
  
Four weeks later, the house finally fully furnished, Red came by to pick Lizzie up  
  
"I got a surprise for you," she told him, almost shyly and Red let her pull him down the hallway into the small room next to the living room.  
  
He found more than a room, more than a gift; what he found was a declaration: The room had been transformed. Bookshelves, half of them already filled, covered most of the wall space and the free space around the window was decorated with framed pictures and art prints. The floor was covered with a large Persian rug and in the middle of it all there was a comfortable-looking armchair and a small leather couch grouped around a low coffee table.  
  
"Feel free to keep some terribly expensive whiskey here," Liz said, rubbing at her scar. "Do you like it?"  
  
"What is this, Lizzie?" Red asked, because he knows that when things seem too good to be true they usually are.  
  
"It’s for you," Liz said. "It’s … I was hoping you’d be staying here, with me, sometimes, and if you wanted to read or tinker, tight might be nicer than the living room?"  
  
She sounded unsure and there was really no other option than to push her up against the closest bookshelf and kiss her until her body was completely relaxed against his, her hands gripping the lapels of his coat.  
  
"Thank you," he whispered against her lips. "Thank you."  
  
Red didn’t change a thing in the room, but he did bring some terribly expensive whiskey and a nice reading lamp from one of his safe houses.  
  
Now, he turns on the lamp and settles down in the armchair. There is a soft green blanket neatly folded over the back of the armchair that smells delightfully like Lizzie’s detergent and her perfume. Red smooths it across his lap and lets it fall down over his legs. He is glad none of his enemies can see him now, a creature of such simple comforts and pleasures, his greatest strength and weakness sleeping soundly in a bedroom not sixty feet away.  
The book he is currently re-reading, _The Neverending Story_ , is on the coffee table and Red picks it up and opens it to his spot, tucking the picture he uses as a bookmark into the back of the book.  
  
Red manages to lose himself in the story of Bastian and Fantastica until the sky outside is already brightening. He is turning another page when the door opens and Lizzie pads inside, her hair a sleep-tousled halo around her head and pillow creases still on her cheek. She is wearing a t-shirt of his; even his wardrobe is not safe from her quick fingers.  
  
"What are you doing up so early, sweetheart?" Red asks, putting his book to the side.  
  
"I could ask you the same thing," Lizzie gives back and folds herself gracefully onto his lap, her arms finding their way around his neck as if the two of them have been together for years and years, this already a familiar dance.  
  
She can probably feel his heart beat against his ribs like a hummingbird whenever she’s this near.  
  
"Trouble sleeping?" Lizzie asks and kisses him gently before he can answer.  
  
He will never tire of this, her heat and her lips against his body, against his skin, holding him tight, tethering him to the here and now. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for her.  
  
"What’s keeping you awake, Red?"  
  
Her lips are still hovering over his and it takes Red a moment to come back to himself.  
  
"Nothing that needs to trouble you," he finally says, rubbing his hands up Lizzie’s bare thighs.  
  
"If it troubles you, it troubles me."  
  
"How is your shoulder?"  
  
"Don’t deflect, Red," Lizzie says. She leans her forehead against his. "I understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but don’t deflect, not with me. Don’t use me getting hurt as an excuse to not talk to me."  
  
She will figure it out, he knows she will; he just had to fall in love with a profiler.  
  
"You’re not sleeping because I got hurt."  
  
"I’m not sleeping because of all the ways in which me loving you will inevitably get you hurt even more."  
  
It is, Red has to admit, maybe the most honest he has ever been with her.  
  
Liz leans back a bit and simply looks at him, eyes roaming over his face and he doesn’t doubt that she can see absolutely everything.  
  
"I love you," she finally says. "And that is worth everything, Red. It is worth everything to me. Is it not worth everything to you?"  
  
"I would burn the world down for you, Lizzie."  
  
Her smile shines brighter than the sun, creeping slowly up the sky outside the window.  
  
"How about we don’t commit arson before, say, ten o’clock and instead go back to bed?"  
  
She presses another kiss to his lips, as if she needed to persuade him to come to bed with her. If there was a reasonable way for him to spend his days in bed with Lizzie, he would, criminal empire and blacklist be damned.  
  
"Lead the way, sweetheart," Red says and lets her pull him out of the armchair and up the stairs and into the bed with its messy, twisted sheets and into her waiting arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally stole the aggressive negotiations from Star Wars, but I truly feel that it's Red's favorite kind of negotiation.  
> Also, he's reading The Neverending Story, because it's my favorite book.

**Author's Note:**

> Red's chapter will be up tomorrow.


End file.
